Russ Diamond, a
businessman from Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, put up just $182.47 last year to
launch PACleanSweep.com, a site dedicated to defeating every single incumbent
in the Pennsylvania legislature. It’s safe to say his money has been well
spent. During the previous decade, no more than five legislators had been voted
out of office in any election year. But in this year’s May primary, 17 sitting
lawmakers, including two Senate leaders with more than five decades of
experience between them, were denied the chance to stand for re-election. The
17 defeated lawmakers, plus the 30 members who announced their retirement
following the same wave of public outrage, added up to almost a 20 percent
turnover for the next legislative session. And there’s still the general
election in November to come.
The precipitating event
happened in the wee hours of the morning on July 7, 2005, when state lawmakers
voted themselves pay raises of up to 34 percent. Since that bill was passed,
Diamond, a former Libertarian Party candidate for various offices who runs his
own sound engineering business, has recruited almost 100 candidates, all of
whom signed a pledge that if elected they would not take the pay raise.
Diamond, an average-sized man in his early 40s with a thick Central
Pennsylvania accent, decided to run as an independent for the governor’s
mansion.
Diamond’s gubernatorial
campaign turned out to be a bust, but his larger crusade has been a tremendous
success. His efforts show that even if a third party is doomed to failure, a
third political brand can work wonders. Diamond’s campaign has run
candidates in both parties’ primaries and as independents by staking out a
single-issue identity. With that small initial investment of $182.47, he
successfully built a political identity and sold it to working-class
Pennsylvania voters. Nationally, Diamond’s campaign could serve as a model for
others trying to overturn entrenched incumbents and bring fresh faces—and fresh
ideas—into politics.
Jubelirer’s Jubilee
Plans for a salary
increase had been circulating in the Harrisburg Capitol long before the summer
2005 vote. In November 2004 Gov. Ed Rendell, a Democrat, was stuck in a
legislative battle with a Republican legislature that complained he had yet to
deliver on a pay raise. According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, the
disagreement culminated in a meeting in Rendell’s office, during which Senate
President Pro Tempore Bob Jubelirer—whose wife, a judge, also would have
benefited from a pay raise—angrily confronted the governor. Rendell replied
that he would not sign a pay raise unless the GOP agreed to spend more on
his pet projects. Whether or not it was a quid pro quo, he got at least some of
what he asked for: Among other things, the legislature passed emergency
spending for mass transit, and the final budget included money to implement
environmental bonds.
During budget
discussions the following summer, legislative language for the pay raise came
in the form of Act 44, which made congressional salaries the benchmark for
state lawmakers’ salaries. Under the act, state representatives and senators
would get a base salary half that paid to U.S. representatives, who currently
receive about $165,000 a year. Act 44 also increased pay for judges and other
high-level government officials. Because the state constitution says lawmakers
may not accept pay increases in the middle of a session, members took their
raises in the form of “unvouchered expenses,” which don’t require receipts.
When
Rendell signed the bill into law, he hailed it on the grounds that it took the
power to increase salaries out of lawmakers’ hands by tying their pay to the
salaries earned by members of Congress. He also argued that to keep bringing
bright legal minds to the statehouse and the courts, salaries had to be in the
range of what law school graduates could earn at private firms in their first
year. The defense went over well in urban Philadelphia, but not in the
conservative midstate area, where both the cost of living and constituent
salaries are much lower. The median household income in Central Pennsylvania is
about $42,000, and state legislators had approved salaries for themselves
almost twice that in most cases—around $81,000, depending on a lawmaker’s
leadership role and committee assignments. The job is full-time and the
leadership tends to work long nights, but no one is clocking hours during the
legislature’s 11-week summer recess. The raise made Pennsylvania’s General
Assembly the second highest-paid legislature in the country, next to
California’s.
The public outrage was
amplified by follow-up stories in the press about the lawmakers’ job perks.
These benefits included a $600 monthly allowance to lease a car, a plum
lifetime health care plan for lawmakers and their spouses, and a $140 per diem
payment when the legislature was in session, ostensibly for travel expenses,
that members received regardless of how far they lived from Harrisburg.
The fallout was almost
immediate. Calls flooded lawmakers’ phone lines, and email messages filled
reporters’ inboxes. Diamond led the initial surge of criticism by launching PACleanSweep.com a few days
after the vote. Soon talk radio picked up the issue, and then the opinion pages
started chiming in. Tim Potts—co-founder of Democracy Rising PA, a grassroots reform
group that opposed the pay hike—says “people were mostly mad about the pay
raise, but then they started learning about the other perks and the other ways
lawmakers treat taxpayers like walking wallets.”
The first sign that
local activists’ efforts were paying off came in November 2005, when voters
turned out state Supreme Court Justice Russell Nigro—the first time in
Pennsylvania’s history that a sitting judge had lost a retention vote. Nigro
and a fellow justice, Sandra Schultz Newman, were targeted because they tacitly
supported the pay legislation, which included a salary increase for them.
(Newman managed to win re-election, with 54 percent of the vote.)
A little more than four
months after the salary increase was approved, Rendell signed a bill repealing
it. Public opposition had been so strong that lawmakers gave in, saying as much
in the text of the repeal legislation. With about a year left before the
general election, Diamond looked for a way to maintain his movement’s momentum.
Everybody Out
Diamond’s involvement in
politics had begun in the previous election cycle, when he ran simultaneously
for U.S. Congress and the state legislature as a Libertarian. He garnered less
than 4 percent of the vote in the congressional race and about 16 percent in
the General Assembly race.
Diamond says he was a
registered Republican in the years before his twin campaigns and that he
reregistered as a Libertarian for the election, but that he should have been an
independent all along. “I have a real hard time with political parties,” he
says. “With small parties, candidates go out and say things that do not win
elections. But then the party is branded by the image of those candidates.”
Many voters thought he was a member of the “Liberal Party” or knew only that
the Libertarian Party supported relaxed drug laws. After 2004, Diamond says, he
changed his registration back to Republican, only to switch it to independent
this year.
As a politician, Diamond
is not exactly smooth and polished. In his 2004 campaigns, he laid out his
“Experiences, Lessons and Motivations” on his blog—a 5,700-word manifesto detailing
his four divorces, an ex-girlfriend’s abortion, a ticket for public
drunkenness, and his experience with financial bankruptcy. This year he took
the entry down because, he says, he revamped the site’s content when he decided
to run for governor. All the original entries were removed, along with the
Libertarian platform and position papers.
The Internet propelled
Diamond’s movement, but it also made it hard for him to hide his mistakes. An
anonymous site, UnCleanSweep.com, popped up in February 2006 detailing the
foibles of Diamond, his group, and its candidates. One entry on the site
compares Diamond’s expense reports to those of the late Enron executive Ken
Lay. Another entry picks out posts from a PACleanSweep
candidate’s personal blog comparing the Bush administration to Hitler’s regime.
After his unsuccessful
attempts at attracting attention to his political campaigns, Diamond didn’t
think
PACleanSweep.com would have
much of an impact. But reporters pounced on the story almost immediately, and
in the few weeks following the pay raise 40,000 unique visitors checked out his
site, 2,600 people subscribed to his listserv, and 13 candidates inspired by
his anti-incumbent message said they were ready to run. The candidates came
from all walks of life: old and young, doctors and custodians, Democrats and
Republicans and independents.
Diamond’s goal was
simple: Vote every incumbent out of office, regardless of whether he or
she had voted for the raise. Even legislators who opposed the raise should have
spoken out against it in the months prior to its passage, he argued, instead of
letting it pass in the middle of the night without any floor debate. Anyone, he
insisted, had to be better than the current incumbents. “Do not, under any
circumstance, vote for any incumbent for State Representative or State
Senator,” the site urged. “If there is no challenger, either don’t cast a vote,
or better yet, write in someone else. Anyone else. It doesn’t matter, just do
not vote for an incumbent.”
So Diamond started
collecting candidates—a total of 97 by the time they announced themselves in
late January 2006. PACleanSweep
couldn’t fund their campaigns; its operating budget hovered around $20,000. But
it did advise candidates on strategy. More important, it gave candidates an
identity, a brand, with which voters were already familiar. Although candidates
were listed under their parties on the ballot, voters knew them as anti–pay
raise candidates because almost every news story and editorial endorsement
mentioned the issue. When the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette supported family
law attorney and PACleanSweep
candidate Lisa Bennington over 28-year incumbent Rep. Frank Pistella in the
21st District’s Democratic primary, the editorial cited her stance
against the pay raise. When the Washington Observer-Reporter endorsed PACleanSweep candidate
Jesse White, also an attorney, in the 46th District’s Democratic primary after
26-year incumbent Rep. Victor Lescovitz retired, the paper mentioned White’s
alliance with PACleanSweep.
By May, if you knew there was a primary, you knew which name on the ballot
belonged to the PACleanSweep
candidate. Or at least you knew which one wasn’t the incumbent who had raised
his or her own salary.
The candidates were
rarely typical politicians. Bill Ogden, a Republican running for state
representative in the Pittsburgh area, is a personal trainer who says it’s
“bull crap” for state legislators to get free health care when 50 percent of
their constituents can’t afford it. Brian “Bubba” Blasko, an independent
running in southwestern Westmoreland County, is a college student and custodial
worker at a local school district; he was salutatorian of his high school
class—in 2003.
PACleanSweep has its share
of politicians with familiar backgrounds, such as lawyers and college
professors, but it also endorsed a disabled stay-at-home foster parent and some
self-employed painting contractors. As long as the candidates weren’t
incumbents, they were eligible for the site’s support.
Out of the 97
candidates, 35—including 12 Democrats, 20 Republicans, and three members of
minor parties—won their primaries. Some of those were unopposed; others ran
against each other in the same primary. More pertinent to the cause were the 17
incumbents who were denied reelection, including two in the Senate leadership.
Thirteen of the fallen were Republicans, and of the 17 candidates who defeated
the incumbents, seven were endorsed by PACleanSweep.
Two of the remaining
incumbent slayers drew on the pay raise issue as well. Tire salesman Mike
Folmer, a friend of Diamond’s, beat Diamond’s own state senator, Senate
Majority Leader David Brightbill, by almost 2 to 1 in the Republican primary,
despite having far fewer funds and resources than his opponent. Diamond had
considered running for the seat himself if no one else stepped up to challenge
Brightbill, but his reputation among Lebanon County Republicans had suffered
because of his Libertarian candidacy two years before. So he and Folmer agreed
to quietly support each other, though Folmer refrained from applying for a
formal PACleanSweep
endorsement.
Brightbill’s
campaign manager, Greg Becker, was surprised by Brightbill’s loss. In
retrospect, however, he understands: “The legislature did something that the
public didn’t appreciate.” Besides opposing the pay raise, Folmer campaigned as
a fiscal conservative, noting that both the state’s budget and the state income
tax had increased in the previous few years. In any other election year, that
might not have mattered. But in the year of the pay raise, voters examined
lawmakers’ fiscal records more closely.
Meanwhile, in Altoona,
Blair County Commissioner John Eichelberger beat Bob Jubelirer, the top
Republican in the state Senate, who had come to be known as the architect of
the pay raise. Although Eichelberger, like Folmer, was not a PACleanSweep candidate, he
benefited from the media coverage that Diamond’s candidates received. “I think
it was the media’s agenda, and they fueled the fire to the public,” complains
Jen Holman, Jubelirer’s campaign manager. “There was discontent around the
state fueled by an upset public and the media that was working against any and
all incumbents.”
The most colorful
candidate in Diamond’s orbit might be the Harrisburg activist Gene Stilp, who
ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor in the Democratic primary. Though
not officially associated with the PACleanSweep
organization, Stilp often shares a platform with Diamond. He was the mastermind
behind a 20-foot-high inflatable pink pig that traveled to dozens of locations
across the state in the weeks leading up to the primaries. Everywhere the pig
went, so did signs and banners reminding passers-by of the name of their local
state legislator.
The pink behemoth took
multiple trips to Jubelirer’s district and even showed up in Brightbill’s
precinct on Election Day. It provided the perfect photo for every local
newspaper.
Victories and Defeats
Diamond has suffered one
major defeat: the failure of his gubernatorial campaign. Voters tended not to
blame Gov. Rendell for the pay raise he had signed into law, focusing their ire
instead on state lawmakers and their tax-funded luxury sedans. Largely as a
result, Diamond was unable to gather the 67,000 signatures he needed to get
onto the ballot as an independent, falling short by some 29,000 names. “He
thought he could run it for two hours a day in his weblog,” says Pete
DeCoursey, a writer for the Pennsylvania political newsletter Capitolwire.
“He just sat in his office and waited for everyone else to carry the banner for
him.”
While Diamond was
mulling a bid for governor, the PACleanSweep
board began to suspect he was using the group as a launching pad for his own
political career. After Diamond’s candidacy was leaked to the press, a handful
of board members filed a lawsuit in the Lebanon County Court seeking to
dissolve the nonprofit corporation. A week after Diamond missed the deadline to
get on the gubernatorial ballot, a judge ruled in their favor. Showing he had
learned a thing or two about political spin, Diamond hailed the decision,
declaring it meant that PACleanSweep
was losing its “corporate bureaucracy.”
Diamond’s failure to get
on the ballot didn’t remove the pay raise issue from the gubernatorial race.
After the primary, the Republican candidate for governor, former Pittsburgh
Steeler Lynn Swann, took up reform as his campaign buzzword. Swann, who had
never run for political office before, initially campaigned with statehouse
Republicans. He even endorsed Jubelirer. But after Jubelirer lost in the
primary and Swann’s poll numbers started sinking, the former football player
began singing a new song, saying the state government should be overhauled and
the legislature (the country’s second largest, after California’s) shrunk. The
reform theme has helped Swann somewhat by rallying his previously unfocused
campaign around a single issue, but Rendell, who has more than $10 million in
his war chest, is still considered close to a sure thing for re-election.
The next test for
Diamond’s candidates will be the general election in November. DeCoursey and
other statehouse observers estimate that an additional 15 incumbents will lose
re-election in the fall. Activist Stilp predicts an even bigger exodus next
year—up to 100 seats—as lawmakers decide to retire because, without the pay
raise, they won’t see any increase in their pensions if they stick around.
Even if he is only
marginally successful, Diamond’s plan of attack could be mimicked to elect
nonmainstream candidates across the country. The first step, obviously, is to
find an issue that resonates with voters. Charlie Cook, editor of the national
political newsletter The Cook Political Report, says the only time he’s
seen national bipartisan anti-incumbency sentiment was the congressional
turnover in 1992, fueled by the House Bank and Post Office scandals. But then,
Congress isn’t the only institution with incumbents.
The second step is to
focus on local offices. In statewide races, it’s harder to unseat incumbents
based on a single issue. But state legislators get much less press coverage
than statewide officials. When almost every news story and editorial about a
race focuses on a wildly unpopular decision by the legislature, the election
becomes a single-issue referendum on the incumbent. “It had a face, these
incumbents you could actually see,” says Franklin & Marshall College
pollster and political analyst G. Terry Madonna. “These bogeymen…you could
identify and put a face on them. That always helps.”
The third step is to get
as much free advertising as possible. Stunts like Diamond’s throw-the-bums-out
website and Stilp’s giant traveling pig attracted a lot of press attention yet
stayed on message.
In Pennsylvania, Diamond
capitalized on his issue and maximized media coverage for his candidates. His
own electoral bid fizzled, but his approach changed his state’s political landscape.
And beyond Pennsylvania?
Some observers, including Diamond himself, are skeptical that the PACleanSweep movement could
ever be copied. Cook notes that a strong anti-incumbency wave has yet to
blossom this year on a national scale. But other experts, such as Madonna, do
see some anti-incumbency trends in their polling. We’ve already watched the
Iraq war spark a revolt among Connecticut Democrats, bringing disaffected
voters out in droves to deny the 18-year incumbent Sen. Joe Lieberman his party’s
nomination. On the right, the conservative Club for Growth has denied several
sitting Republicans the GOP’s
support.
By creating a brand for
his candidates and marketing PACleanSweep
as a synonym for reform, Diamond offered an alternative to the status quo and
launched an army of political novices on a journey to the state Capitol. Don’t
be surprised if you see more angry organizers following in his footsteps.
Shira Toeplitz
is a staff writer for The Hotline, published by National Journal.